My Life is Cancer

"You have cancer."

Today 1 in 2 people are diagnosed with cancer; how soon before it's 1 in 1? What will happen when you get told those words by a man in a white overcoat? Will you shudder a little bit inside, the way that no one sees? Will you scream at him, curse him? Will you burst into tears? Will you accept it immediately? Will you demand a cure?

You'll probably do all these things and more. Cancer is scary surely. An almost death sentence that seems to come out of nowhere. Why me, you might ask? What did I do to deserve this? Our culture teaches us that we do nothing wrong, that nature hates us that that's why cancers afflict us unexpectedly. We did nothing to bring this on.

But of course we do plenty to provide cancer with fertile soil. Our lives are cancer. From all the chemicals that should never have existed to the microwaves flying through the air, from polluted air and water to all the plastic floating on the sea; cancer covers our food and we apply it to our skin. For the civilized, cancer is our birthright.

A little boy has cancer. For some time he's undergone "treatment" which involves pumping chemicals (yes ironically the same ones that cause cancer) into his veins. This makes him terribly sick, worse than you can imagine, unless you've gone through it yourself. He doesn't want it to go on, he and his parents want to stop, try a new nonviolent treatment and enjoy their remaining time together.

Doctors, those priests of humanity, say without their "treatment" he has six months to live. To decline "treatment" would challenge the sacrosanctness of human life and this is unacceptable. Human life must go on at all costs, regardless of quality of life. No one says this overtly but this is the message in all such cases. How can you ignore it?

So the state says he has to undergo treatment.

The child is removed from his family. His parents are arrested for their protests. The child lays alone on a bright white bed under fluorescent lights and a tray of half-eaten, nutritionally void food rests on his table. Experts in clean white who know better than him, ignore him, avoid his gaze and plug him into machines designed to squeeze out every last breath of life, however hollow it might be. He is more scared of them and their "treatment" as the cancer. He wants to go home.

Sometimes people have to die. It's their time. What's the use of hanging on? If we fail to accept this, we reject life. Then all we have left is the cancer our civilization breeds.